“Well, we opened the building around 6 p.m. [Central Time] tonight, and the roof was fine, there wasn’t any intrusion coming in at all,” Smoothie King Center general manager Allan Freeman told Jeremiah Johnson of FOX Sports Indiana, noting that it wasn’t until after both teams had come out onto the court, done their pre-game shootarounds, and headed back to their locker rooms that the problem began to surface. “My best guess is we started noticing a small leak around 6:20, maybe 6:30.

Workers mop the court during a delay for the start of an NBA basketball game against the Indiana Pacers in New Orleans, Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018. (AP)

“The thing with roof leaks is, you really don’t know where the intrusion is coming from,” Freeman said. “You know where it’s falling, but the leak itself could be 100 feet from where the water’s actually falling. So, we’re not actually going to try to repair the leak tonight, but we’re trying to create a catch basin, if you will, to catch where the water’s coming in so we can play the basketball game.”

That process didn’t happen as quickly as Freeman or anybody else involved in the event would’ve liked …

In case you aren't watching on TV, there's no way #Pacers and #Pelicans are tipping off at 8:30. It's 8:24, roof is still leaking, both teams still in locker rooms.

As 9 p.m. ET neared, the catch basin was in place, with arena staff and the teams planning to wait a few minutes to find out if it’s performing satisfactorily to keep the water off the court, thus protecting the players from having to try to run, plant and cut on a slippery surface.

Alvin Gentry and Nate McMillan are are standing under the spot of the leak with the refs. Players still haven't taken the court.

More than a half-hour later, everybody involved was still waiting on word:

The last update provided by Chuck Edwards – the PA announcer here, not a weatherman – was that the teams are in communication with #NBA to get update on situation and status of this game. Don't have any further info yet https://t.co/7qMZ4bEakP

It remains to be seen when the game will be made up. The rain date could loom large for both teams. Indiana is 30-25, in sixth place in the East, just 1 1/2 games out of third place and only two games out of ninth in the congested conference. New Orleans, too, is in a nip-and-tuck fight for a return to the postseason, sitting in eighth place in the West at 28-25, two games back of fifth-seeded Oklahoma City but just a half-game up on the ninth-seeded Los Angeles Clippers.